Authors Archives: Nick Cohen

When Martin Amis returned to Britain from two years living overseas, he found a liberal-Left wallowing in self-delusion.[1] Asked by the Independent what had shocked him most since he got home he replied: “The most depressing thing was the sight of middle-class white demonstrators waddling around under placards saying, ‘We Are All Hezbollah Now.’ Well, make the most of being Hezbollah while you can. As its leader, famously advised the West: ‘We don’t want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you.’” While critics could say that Leftists boasting of their conversion to Islamism were a fringe phenomenon, Amis made it clear that he was talking about the mainstream, not the fringe, when he went on British Broadcasting Corporation’s Question Time, the most popular political discussion program of the day. “A woman in the audience,” he reprted, “her voice quavering with self-righteousness, presented the following argument. Since it was America that supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians, the US armed forces, in response to September 11, ‘should be dropping bombs on themselves!’ And the audience applauded. It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a credal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.”[2]